The NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission has voted to designate an extension of the Greenwich Village Historic District. This extension, which adds 235 buildings to the protected Historic District (click here to view map) includes 7 Leroy Street, one of the 13 Federal-style houses that the Conservancy began advocating for seven years ago. With our partner, the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, the Conservancy began a campaign to protect those 13 houses by releasing the report “Federal Era Row House of Lower Manhattan.” Now, nine of the 13 Federals have been designated.

In 1964 Ada Louise Huxtable made a plea for the preservation of Lower Manhattan’s most venerable and vulnerable buildings. “Few New Yorkers realize,” she wrote in Classic New York, that the comfortable, charming, and historically important small house c. 1800-30 still exists. It is too well hidden, too efficiently defaced, and—above all—too fast disappearing.” In a response to the loss of these buildings, to alteration, demolition, and disuse, the Conservancy issued the report which highlights 13 Federals, all below 23rd Street, and featuring the typical elements that distinguish the style: Flemish bond façade, windows with simple paneled lintels, doorways with simple brownstone arches around the fanlight, pitched roofs, and dormers.

Since 2003, the Landmarks Commission has taken action on 12 of the 13 buildings. Eight have been designated as individual landmarks. The Commission held a hearing on 57 Sullivan Street in June 2009, but has not taken a vote on designation. Three are unprotected: no action has been taken on 2 Oliver Street, and 94 ½ and 96 Greenwich Street were taken off the Commission’s designation calendar in 2009 because they were found to be too compromised (despite the fact that many of the alterations were made since the Conservancy first started its advocacy for the buildings in 2003.)